Wiki Shares “Pesto” Video / Announces OOFIE Album Due Next Week

Since disbanding the rap project, RATKING, back in 2016, Manhattan-bred emcee, Patrick “WIKI” Morales, has trudged forward proving that, when creatively driven and motivated enough, making moves independent of a larger unit can often work in one’s favor.  After the enthusiastic build up of the super group, Secret Circle, which included Lil Ugly Mane and was ultimately shelved due to some fucked up revelations regarding their third member, Morales never really missed a beat.  He’d released mixtapes as a solo artist in the past, but his debut No Mountains In Manhattan arrived in 2017 as his first real legitimate studio album.  Featuring appearances by Ghostface Killah, Kaytranada, and Your Old Droog, it was a critically acclaimed effort that, unfortunately, never really evolved into much of a concert tour.  Instead, WIKI tends to make random live appearances, primarily in the New York area.  He also announced the release after dropping singles in a similarly random fashion, containing no official statement that anything further was on its way when each of them hit the net.  That’s why when the track like “Cheat Code.” appeared in February, followed by the Madlib produced “Eggs” in late September, with little in between, things began to feel eerily similar.  It was hard not to feel like a larger project was on the way.  Today those hopes have been confirmed.

WIKI is the type of artist that could disappear forever and it wouldn’t seem too surprising.  That’s not to say that he’d be forgotten, but he doesn’t shove himself out into the public eye as consistently others might.  Not unlike MF DOOM — someone who definitely still maintains relevance — he tends to fall back until he has something to release.  This gives the impression that Morales is simply too busy, focused on, and concerned with working on his craft to concern himself with whether or not he’s making sure that anyone else really knows about it.  Meanwhile, the way that his individual tracks and videos are released without any mention of being connected to a something more substantial, makes me wonder if he’s actually just giving us these tracks whenever they are finished and assembling them into a larger project later, if he has it all mapped out like this from the jump, or exactly what the process or mindset is.  That being said, there’s something that I like about an artist simply popping up to essentially state, “Hey.  Made an album.  It’s coming out next week,” without any of the typical fanfare hyping a release months in advance.

OOFIE drops on November 8th on Morales‘s own Wikset label and, even though we’re only 7 days out, we still know next to nothing more about it than that.  There’s been no track list announcement and we can’t even say for sure if “Cheat Code” or “Eggs” are even going to appear on this thing.  What we do have is a video for a song called “Pesto,” which the press release refers to as “the first taste of the album.” Co-directed by Matt Seger and Dexter Brierley for Underhill the green-tinted video is another NY-centric effort for the rapper and, quite possible, features the most polished looking visuals we’ve seen from him.  The song itself was produced by long-time collaborator, Tony Seltzer who was not only the man behind “Cheat Code,” but also handled numerous tracks on his previous album.

Check it out below.